


Under My Skin

by miasnape



Category: White Collar
Genre: Community: sharp_teeth, Gen, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-02
Updated: 2012-03-02
Packaged: 2017-11-01 00:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miasnape/pseuds/miasnape
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter, El, and Neal are trapped in a cabin upstate during a blizzard with something out there in the snow trying to get in. In fact, it might *be* the snow, which has weird voices in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under My Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Written for dotfic.

Elizabeth was shuddering under his arm and the fingers of his right hand were stiff around the grip of the gun. Neal hated guns. They lacked the kind of elegance and capriciousness he tended to favour in day to day life. The situation he was currently in utterly lacked either of those qualities too, and Neal was ready to get as far away from both as he could just as soon as he was able to.

The wind outside was deafening, his heart was pounding, and Elizabeth's breath was trembling out in sporadic gusts against his shoulder, but Neal was straining to hear the solid sound of Peter's footsteps returning, trying desperately not to hear anything else.

Earlier that evening they'd had Cole Porter on, an old record they'd found in the cabinet under an immaculately restored 1920s phonograph. He'd sat at the kitchen table with a glass of well-aged Bordeaux in his hand and the heady scent in the air of a good stew cooking, grinning wide and happy as he'd watched Peter spin Elizabeth around in the too-small space of the cabin. The logs in the fireplace and the music had popped and crackled in harmony and he'd found himself singing under his breath without really knowing when he'd started, so deep in my heart that you're really a part of me, I've got you under my skin.

They'd taken the needle off the record when Elizabeth was serving up the stew and let the occasional bursts of snow against the windows serve as an accompaniment to their conversation, and when the dishes had been put away to soak and the Scrabble board had been set up, Elizabeth had broken off in the middle of recounting the Dirty Scrabble Debacle of Christmas 2004 to listen to the snowstorm blazing outside with a ferocity that made Neal glad that Peter had got them up and out of the city at a ridiculous hour of the morning and settled in the cabin by lunchtime with the fire started and all of their provisions in.

A violent gust of wind shook the door in its frame and Neal pulled Elizabeth in closer and shushed the tiny, helpless noise she made in her throat. The fire had died about an hour ago and the cold had leeched in quickly, stealing the warmth they'd built up and with it the illusion of distance from the harshness of the winter outside. Peter had tried to put them both at ease with pragmatic comments about wind tunnel effects and the chimney flue while he tried to get it going again, but by then they'd all heard it and when the lights had flickered and died ten minutes after that none of them had been particularly surprised.

It had been June who had told Neal the tale he had spun for Elizabeth and Peter on the drive upstate that morning, and she had heard it, way back when she and Byron first started spending their summers there, from the four old men who had sat out the ends of their lives together on the porch of the General Store five miles down from the cabin. Elizabeth had loved it, curled around on the front seat of the car to watch him, looking for all the world like she was six years old behind her eyes. Peter had been Peter, all conscientious and focused on the road, with only an occasional glance at his wife or behind him in the rear-view mirror when they were on a particularly empty or straight stretch of road to show he was listening at all. Neal had loved the attention, loved the way Elizabeth didn't hesitate to show her delight in the mystery and drama of his retelling and the relaxed amusement in Peter's eyes when he caught them in the mirror.

 

Way, way back, he'd told them, around the time when the American Destiny had first started to seem Manifest, there had lived three sisters who, for reasons no one ever quite knew, had moved there together quite late in their lives with not a father or a husband or a son between them. They kept mostly to themselves but were polite in conversation and would lend a hand around the community when it was needed, so folk never paid them or their odd ways much mind until one night when the pastor and his family awoke to a ruckus at their door. When they opened it the youngest of the trio was curled against the threshold, breathless and sobbing and trying to talk with a voice so ravaged and broken that none of them could understand more from her words than that something had taken her sisters; that something terrible and evil had happened to them all. Her feet were bare and bloody and her nightclothes were soaked; torn and muddied from running so long and far in the darkness.

The family took her in and cleaned her up and tried to get some sense from the woman, but even after she fell into an exhausted sleep and woke the next day she couldn't, whether by damage to her voice or damage to her mind, speak of what had happened to her. The pastor and his eldest boy had gone up to the sisters' home to look for the other two women but, aside from the wreck and ruin of their furniture and clothes that had been flung in pieces all about the place, they could find no clues as to what had happened.

That next night the youngest sister woke from a fitful rest to the sound of snow beating against the windows of the pastor's house, and when she went to the window to look out on the storm she saw the face of her eldest sister staring at her, a strange and devilish light in her eyes. As if in a trance the woman lifted the window latch and climbed out into the snowy night and followed as her sister took her hand and led her away into darkness. By morning the only sign that she had been there was the blanket strewn carelessly across the floor of the freezing room and the drift of snow glistening on the inside of the windowsill.

The sisters, Neal had said as the world outside the car got steadily more green and bucolic, were never heard from again. But every so often, when the earth got hard and the trees lost their leaves, there would come a story of whispers in the snow and pale faces in the dark with a wicked glow to their eyes, and another soul would go out into the storm, never to be seen again.

Elizabeth had laughed and shivered and said it was a pity they didn't have Satchmo with them to protect them all from things that went bump in the night and Peter had made a stupid joke that had Neal and Elizabeth sharing a look of mock despair before laughing despite themselves, and they'd driven on into the sunrise with their takeaway coffees still warm in their hands.

 

Neal flexed his fingers a little in a vain attempt to ease the stiffness and stared into the darkness of the cabin at where he thought the door was, waiting and hoping for Peter's knock; for the signal of two-three-one they'd agreed on, waiting for someone to say it was a silly idea and seeing in each other's eyes that they all knew it wasn't.

“I'm just going to get the cellphones and the radio,” Peter had said, his voice low and gentle but somehow still too loud in the dark, even against the sound of the wind - It's not the wind, it's the snow, Elizabeth had said, staring out at the blizzard when they still had light if not heat. It's something in the snow, and Neal had pulled her away and back to Peter and the fireplace and their half-finished game of Scrabble on the coffee table because she was right, somehow; right in a way that made his flesh crawl and his instincts scream at him to get away from it, to not even look at it.

“We need to call someone to let them know what's going on out here. To get help,” Peter had said, and there had been a rustle and a vague blur of dark on darker that let Neal know that one of them had reached out to touch the other.

“We don't even know what's going on here,” Elizabeth had said, voice angry and scared and vulnerable like Neal had never heard her before. He reached out into the darkness until his hand met her knee.

“We know that at the very least it's too cold out here not to have any heat. We need--”

“I know we need help,” she had said. “But, Peter, you can't go out there alone.”

There was a voice below Peter's and Elizabeth's, or maybe above them, drowning them out and coming from all directions and none at once. Coming from outside - it's something in the snow - and whispering obscene things in Neal's ear; whispering about something dark and tainted and bitter and wrong, something that seemed to freeze his blood and his mind until he couldn't move or hear anything but the whisper in his head. It didn't use words, but it had a voice – it had more than one and he knew them all, even the ones he couldn't put a name to. Sometimes it was his father, and sometimes it was Kate, and sometimes it was even Peter or Elizabeth. Sometimes it was all of them at once.

Peter's hand had closed over his shoulder and made him jump, startled him out of his trance.

“Neal, stay with me. Don't listen to it.” Peter's voice had been soft and serious, like it was during those quiet moments on the more dangerous cases. Neal had wished he could see Peter's face, wished he could see Elizabeth's thin fingers where they were wrapped around his on her knee, because he has always been a visual person, has needed to see beauty to be focused, and each of those things, each of these people, have their own particular and powerful beauty that could distract him from the snow's whisper.

“I'm here,” Neal had eventually managed, and they had each tightened their grip on him at the same time.

“I'm going to go out to the car, it shouldn't take too long,” Peter had told him, and then something cold was pressed into his hand. Cold and gun-shaped. “It's my backup. You shouldn't need it, but take it anyway. For God's sake, keep the safety on unless you need to use it. Stick with each other and wait for me to get back.”

He'd left not long after, banging the door shut almost as soon as it had opened, and Neal and Elizabeth had curled up together in a knot on the floor behind the couch, facing the door and waiting, trying not to pay attention to the whisper. He's not sure what it's saying to Elizabeth or whose voice it's using, but every times the wind buffets against the windows and door the voices seem to scream in his mind and Elizabeth jerks against his chest.

 

When it started Neal had thought that maybe Peter or Elizabeth were messing with him. He'd turn to try and catch them at it and all he'd see would be a furrowed brow or one of them turning to look back at him just as suspiciously, or to stare out of the windows at the unending blanket of snow streaking past and spattering against the glass. They had kept on playing, though, even if the changing mood had started showing in their choices of word: 'poison' and 'vice' and 'fate'. The volume of the whisper had steadily grown and the snow had seemed to throw itself at the cabin with increasing violence, as if it was trying to find a gap to get in.

That was when the fire had died.

A sudden thud against the front door, more solid than the snow, brought Neal's attention back to the feel of the gun in his hand. Elizabeth's fingers tightened around the clutch of his sweater she had twisted in her hand and they waited, breathing in sync, for whatever was coming next. There was a knock at the door, and another. A pause, and then three more. Another pause, and then a final knock, and together Elizabeth and Neal scrambled to their knees and then to their feet, still holding on to each other as they stumbled the short distance to the door.

“Peter?” Elizabeth called through the door, her voice almost shocking after their terrified silence.

“El, it's me,” came Peter's voice. Elizabeth sagged against Neal's side, and he breathed his relief into her shampoo-scented hair and shoved the gun into the back of his waistband with a shaky hand. “The cellphones weren't working, but the radio was and the local LEOs are sending a couple of guys out to see what's going on.”

Elizabeth opened the door and as soon as Peter was in sight she reached out to pull him inside. Peter held onto her hand and shook his head.

“I think we should go wait in the car, El.” He looked up at Neal. “It still has heat and light, and we know the radio works out there.”

Elizabeth looked around to Neal, who nodded and let go of her so they could follow Peter out to the car. Neal couldn't even remember where they'd parked it anymore.

As he pulled the cabin door shut behind him, stamping his feet on the ground in an effort to stave off the crippling cold of the snowy night, Neal looked up to see which direction to start out in and saw, in the thin light reflecting off the snow, Peter standing several feet away, waiting for him, holding Elizabeth's hand. When Peter looked up at him, his eyes seemed to shine unnaturally bright in the dark, and when he smiled Neal heard the whisper again, falling all around him with the snow, clear and cold. This time the voice was Peter's, and it said a word. It said, “Neal.”

Neal ran.


End file.
